Lleida airport (pot), meet Ciudad Real airport (kettle)

La Vanguardia appears interested in Spanish local airports as a means of diverting large sums of public money to private pockets to no obvious public benefit–except when the airport happens to be a Catalan one.

La Vanguardia draws attention to Le Monde‘s paywalled report on Ciudad Real airport in Castilla-La Mancha, which opened in December 2008 and appears to have cost €640 million in public funds so far while only managing 6 flights (not 3: checked on Ryanair) a week.

Surely La Vanguardia isn’t keeping quiet because it also receives considerable subsidies from the Catalan government!

And surely the Catalan government didn’t support it because its nationalist soul was desperate to have an airport run by it rather than the national operator AENA!

And how absurd to imagine that the basic economic rationale of Alguaire-Lleida/Lérida is the same as is alleged in private for some other loss-making strips of tarmac in Spain: to benefit friendly constructors at the taxpayer’s expense!

We believe that such talk is dangerous nonsense, and if anyone feels in the slightest offended we’ll compensate them with a free return flight by Ryanair from the UK to Granada.

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Figures from Vueling and Ryanair are for flights in the first week of November, a horizon of a month being perfectly sufficient for fly-by-nights.

Free flight to Granada subject to Granada agreeing to recommence payments of Danegeld to Michael O’Leary and to the above horizon.

I was ordered to buy one after work this morning. It’s 2.50 and the most absolute pile of shite, and heavy too. It probably didn’t help the quality side of things when they unilaterally cut freelancers’ wages by 50%.